2009/10 Upper Deck hockey preview

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Yeah, I know I’m late with this, but I misread something that caused the delay. I’m not sure Upper Deck even goes through the charade of releasing preview images because I could have told you what the base set would look like back in February. It’ll be this:

Only with a hockey player on it.

The only thing about the preview images that excited me was this:

I mistakenly read that as “Young Guns” and thought that Upper Deck was greatly altering the design of the short printed rookie card subset in relation to the base set. I was ready to review the whole base card-Young Gun relationship from year’s past because I was pretty sure it’d be the first radical design change for the Young Guns cards in Upper Deck’s history.

Of course, that says Top Guns. So I’m glad I didn’t ever get the free time to waste on pointless research.

These are new, though:

Upper Deck goes all oversized on the one color jersey swatches and makes them case hits. Uh, yea? Also in the one-a-case department are the “Clearly Canadian Die-cut acetate cards,” which I believe is the first insert set sponsored by another company. Okay, that’s not true, but what is true is my love of acetate cards, so I wouldn’t be sad if I pulled one. I’m not going out of my way for them. Other case hits includes Signature Sensations and the lamest of all, short prints of the All-World Team insert set, making master sets all the more expensive to chase. Lamest. Idea. Ever.

I feel like I’ve talked about this too much already. It’s pretty much the standard setup for Upper Deck hockey series 1. And it should hit the streets in November at around 60-65 a box.

I pulled a Mario Lemieux UD Signatures autographed card out of a 2007-08 UD series 2 box at my local card shop. I realize big hits like that don’t come very often for the average consumer like me, so it’s one of my favorite cards I pulled!